


A Place to Die

by Freakierthanthou



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Seriously don't read this it's disturbing and weird and not that good, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 14:58:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freakierthanthou/pseuds/Freakierthanthou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Les Mis Kink Meme, round 3, based on the following prompt. </p><p>"In the few moments between the soldiers shooting everyone through the floorboards and when they come upstairs - Grantaire rescues Enjolras. Like maybe he knocks him unconscious and drags him to safety.</p><p>But after it's all over Enjolras isn't grateful at all to Grantaire, he's depressed and guilty for leading the amis to their deaths and guilty for staying alive and he takes it all out on Grantaire in subtle and less subtle ways. He's horrible to Grantaire even through they're together. He fucks Grantaire hard while taunting him for wanting it, tells him it should have been him dead instead of any of the others, that his sick selfish love robbed Enjolras of his sacrifice. You get the picture. </p><p>Basically I want broken!guilty!Enjolras and woobie!Grantaire.</p><p>Optional bonus for Enjolras finally realizing what a shit he's been and making it up to Grantaire with sweet sweet penitent lovemaking."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for dubious consent situations, vomit, non-graphic violence and injury recovery, some internalized homophobia, and verbal abuse. Canonical character deaths occur. I can't believe I'm posting this.

Enjolras spared himself a second when Combeferre fell. One second, more of a luxury than he ever would have given himself before, but he was tired. One second to be a young man seeing his friends shot, anything, anything but the leader of the revolution. He took a step forward

A step into a stray bullet. 

As he fell, he heard someone scream his name.

\--

There was a whispered conversation, he couldn't remember it later, but he remembered seeing a window. He couldn't see outside. The light was too bright, his angle all wrong, but he was hit with a sudden memory of shouting and blood and pain and green. 

Blood and pain, shouldn't it be red? 

He blacked out again.

\--

A few more times he came to, thrashing and screaming sometimes, falling back against his pillows at others. 

"Not sure if he'll live-" a voice warned.

"He has to!" cried another.

Enjolras flinched at that, automatically, but he didn't protest. He didn't protest the disembodied voice telling him what he had to do. Because he wanted to. 

He wanted to live.

\--

He groaned again and pulled himself up. The world was tilting around him, rushing past his ears, and he felt his stomach lurch with it. He heaved to one side, the motion involuntary. 

A strong hand caught him by the shoulder, and he was surprised that it didn't hurt. But he was already vomiting into the bowl that appeared right beside him. 

He thought he was finished twice before it ended, but each time the hand gripped tighter at his shoulder, a warm weight, and a soft voice whispered in his ear. No words, it didn't try that, but a constant "ssshhh," like this man thought he was the wind. It calmed the racing in Enjolras's ears. 

Finally he was done, and he started to collapse, but the hands lowered him carefully down onto the pillows. 

Enjolras looked around. 

He was in a small room, not much to look at. There was a table dragged over next to the bed, which now held the bowl, and a pitcher of something he hoped was water. A window was to his right, opposite the table, but Enjolras didn't look outside the window. Next to his bed sat a man, and it took a moment for Enjolras's blurred vision to recognize him. 

Grantaire. 

He looked different, Enjolras supposed. Sober, his mind supplied viciously. His hair had been cut, and he was cleanshaven, smelling of soap and a desire to impress. 

"Grantaire-" he tried to say, but he coughed instead. 

The other man poured him a glass from the pitcher and held it out. Enjolras hesitated. 

"It's alright," Grantaire said. His voice was soft now, like the imitation of the wind from a few moments ago. "It's only water." 

Enjolras took it reluctantly, letting Grantaire tip the cup back into his mouth. He shifted as he did so, and felt a sharp pain in his side, a pain that made him pull away gasping. 

Grantaire spilled some of the water on his bedsheets before he could manage to jerk the glass away. "It's alright," he said, his hands back on Enjolras's shoulders. "Lie back, you're going to be okay. You were shot, do you remember? The doctor says you're recovering-" 

"The barricades," Enjolras said. 

If Grantaire's face fell, Enjolras couldn't bring himself to care about it. "They were overrun," he said stiffly. "My condolences." 

Enjolras shook his head. He wasn't understanding, why wasn't he understanding?

"No," he managed. "The barricade, I was... there. I was there." 

"Yes, you were there." Grantaire's voice was patronizing, and Enjolras wished he had the strength to strike him. "You were there, but we escaped." 

"The others." 

From the look on Grantaire's face, one would think that Enjolras had found the strength after all. 

"They fell with the barricades," he said. "They died for their revolution. You and I are the only ones left." 

Dead. Enjolras let his head fall back onto the pillows and closed his eyes. He couldn't look at Grantaire now, couldn't look out the window at the sun. He could see their faces against the black of his eyelids. He smelled their blood in his memory, even as he smelled the vomit and soap of his new prison. 

"I wish it had been any other."

\------

Enjolras recovered slowly. 

His voice, he imagined, was getting better, but he didn't exercise it enough to find out. Grantaire was the only person he saw regularly, and he refused to speak to him. 

Grantaire spoke enough for them both. Enjolras learned how he had found these lodgings, far enough away from the Musain and either of their apartments, to avoid suspicion. He knew the landlord, although from where, he did not say. A doctor who owed him a favor tended Enjolras. The hospitals were still too dangerous. 

He did not learn how Grantaire had come to take him away from the barricades. Grantaire did not speak of that day. 

He turned his head away from the conversation, each word wrenching up the bile in his throat, but even as he held the bowl and gathered Enjolras's hair away from his face, Grantaire never stopped speaking.

The doctor visited every other day. He was a small rodent of a man, with delicate glasses that perched on the ends of his nose. His face was gray and sunken, and he hissed through his teeth. 

Enjolras spoke to him in short sentences, no more than was necessary. A small, mouse-like girl came to clean the rooms sometimes, but she never looked at him, and he never looked at her. 

The doctor tried to get him to walk. Enjolras obeyed his orders to the letter and never beyond. He crossed the room and back with the doctor's assistance, and then without. Grantaire offered his arm once, but Enjolras shrank away. He could not touch the man who smelled of soap and blood he couldn't wash away. 

He never tried to keep track of the time. He did not know how many days the doctor had visited, how many unending one-sided conversations with Grantaire had whiled away the hours he didn't want in the first place. 

One day the doctor, perhaps realizing that Enjolras would remain stagnant outside of his care, gave him strict instructions for their time apart. 

"Cross this room three times at least, unaided," he said. "And out into the hall, to the end and back. Do not overtire yourself. I believe you can do this, but if you cannot, you must return to bed at once, do you understand me?" 

Enjolras nodded, but he took it as a challenge. 

Grantaire left to see the doctor out, leaving Enjolras in blessed peace and heavy silence.

He could hear the screams now, echoing in his ears. They came when the room went quiet, and Enjolras couldn't shake them. 

He pulled himself out of the bed. 

To the end of the hall and back, he decided. This much, it seemed, would be possible. 

Each movement sent a shock of pain through his body, but he did not flinch from it. What would the others not give for pain, he wondered? He had let them down, all of them, and he could still hear their angry spirits. Too angry to come and claim him, though, and that was all he wanted. This was all he deserved. 

The door opened easily under his hands, and he leaned on it for bare seconds until he realized what he had been doing. 

It was only a second. But he had allowed himself a second when Combeferre fell, hadn't he? And that second had turned into days and weeks, into him abandoning his friends. Too late to join them now. 

No more seconds, he thought, as he pushed himself away from the door.

The hallway was long and unfamiliar. It had the same dark wood as his room did, but no windows, no lit candles. The only light came from his room and from another at the end, a door ajar. This must have been what the doctor had meant. 

Enjolras took a step out into the darkness. 

One step, and then another, and another. He balanced carefully and did not allow himself to listen to the roaring in his ears. 

He heard the doctor's voice before he saw the man. At first, he thought the man was injured.

Wouldn't they have laughed at that? Enjolras, the ice-cold, the virgin. Couldn't tell a groan of pain from one of pleasure. 

He stepped back, but not before he could see the doctor, his thin, weaselly frame outlined against the light, and the curly black hair of the man kneeling before him.

\------

Enjolras collapsed onto the bed. It was more of an accident than anything, and the mattress dug into his bullet wound, hard enough to make him nearly scream, but he relished the violence. It blocked out the blood in his head, the sounds from outside the room. 

He pulled himself up again, to get into bed properly, but his legs gave out underneath him, and he fell again.

This time, solid, warm hands caught him from behind. 

"Sorry," Grantaire whispered in his ear. "Let me help you." 

Enjolras wrenched himself away, although he only fell again. He twisted around to glare at the other man. "I don't want your help," he said. 

Grantaire remained unmoved. "Fine," he said. "Get yourself into bed, then." 

Somehow, his lack of reaction only enraged Enjolras more. "Oh, you've longed to say that, haven't you?" he taunted. "You used to pine for me in your bed, but now you take me to the house of your lover?" 

Grantaire paled. "You misunderstand," he said, his voice stiff. 

"There is little in your perversion that I wish to understand," Enjolras shot back. "You followed me because you fancied yourself in love with a pretty stranger, and now instead of mourning, as is proper, or fighting, as is right, you fall into bed. Do you still call yourself a man, I wonder?" 

"You do not know of what you speak," Grantaire said. His voice was calm, and he sat in his chair by the bedside as if Enjolras's tirade had meant nothing. "Would you like me to explain it to you?" 

Enjolras laughed. "I have no interest in your explanations. Your personal life is your own, and I wish no part in it."

Grantaire spoke, heedless. "It's true that the landlord is a friend, but I've-"

"I wish no part in your life at all!"

"spent my last penny on these rooms-"

"I want nothing to do with you, you who fled while his friends were in danger-" 

"-so I found a doctor who would treat you without money, but he would not do it for free-" 

"-condemned me to the same cowardice-"

"-this was the favor I exchanged for his." 

Enjolras fell silent for a moment as the implications sank in. The implacable stillness of Grantaire's face broke for relief, but he schooled it back to neutrality nearly immediately. 

"You-" Enjolras stopped. 

"Yes," said Grantaire gravely. 

"You are nothing but a common whore." 

Grantaire's lips parted, but it took him a moment to speak. 

"What?" 

"You heard me," Enjolras spat. "You'd sooner fuck a living corpse like that than risk your worthless hide. I would trade your life for any one of the heroes who died at the barricades." 

"I did not do it for myself. My payment is only for your treatment." 

"I live for your own purposes," said Enjolras. "My place was with my friends, although I can hardly expect you to understand that. Whatever sacrifice you pretend to make, it does not compare with what they gave. You will get no thanks from me." 

"I will ask for none," said Grantaire. "Only that you live." 

"I have no desire to," he replied. "Not in this world, one where men like you can get their pleasure on their knees, and pretend that it is a sacrifice. You are nothing, Grantaire. You are selfish, and you are sick, and you are nothing." 

Grantaire remained silent.

"Have you nothing to say?" Enjolras asked finally.

Grantaire made a vague motion with his head. "You will get no argument from me, if that is what you are after," he said. "I do not pretend that I have done anything worth praising. All I have done was out of necessity, to keep you alive." 

"Did you enjoy it?" Enjolras wasn't sure why he taunted Grantaire so, why his voice came out so rough. It brought him no pleasure, and it brought Grantaire no pain, but he kept going, clinging to a vague hope that he might see a flicker of either reaction. "Down on your knees, sucking his cock. Did you feel like you were in your rightful place? Was that all you let him do to you, or did he take you from behind, did you let him ride you-"

"Enough." 

Granaire's voice was sharp, though he still spoke quietly. For the first time since the barricades, Enjolras felt something other than pain coursing through his blood. He felt triumph. 

"Did you close your eyes and pretend it was me?" he asked, continuing relentlessly. "Would that make you happy, make you feel that it was all worth it? Why did you not find him, or any other much earlier, rather than forcing me from where I belonged so you could imagine I might feel something for you one day. There must be some man in Paris desperate enough to permit you to suck his cock, even looking as you do." 

Grantaire remained silent again, but Enjolras could see it now. His face was beginning to show cracks from the strain, the emotion leaking through. 

"Why do you plague me, Grantaire?" he asked. "I don't want you here." 

"I had the chance, so I saved you," Grantaire said. He spoke dully, and he did not look at Enjolras's face. "I would have done the same for any of the others. I do not ask for thanks or praise, nor for your love, which you so freely give to your Patria and to every man, woman, and child you see abased before you, but so delight in withholding from me. I would never ask that of you. I saved you so you might live, nothing else." 

"And why did you have this chance?" Enjolras asked. "Why were you not fighting with the rest of us? Why did you not die in your place?"

"I was drunk." 

He was shaking now, his eyes shining with tears, and Enjolras waited, watching him come apart. The moments ticked by in silence. 

Finally, he whispered, "Come here." 

Grantaire looked up at him. There was no hope in his eyes, no revulsion either. He looked as if he could have been dead. "What?" 

"Come here," Enjolras repeated louder. He pointed to the bed. "You so wish to serve me, you've failed at every other task I've ever entrusted you, even dying, which comes to naturally to all men. You are hardly a man, though. I would call you a dog if I did not fear insulting the curs that roam the streets. At least they have the decency to starve when they're not wanted." 

Grantaire's hair was shorter now, too short to hide his face, and although he turned away, Enjolras could see that he was crying. He was silent about it, at least, and when he spoke, his voice was steady. "What would you have me do?" 

"I would have you do to me what you did for him. If you must repay him for my life, you must repay me too, for I do not give it to you willingly." 

Grantaire stood then, and for a moment it seemed that he might walk out of the room, but instead he crawled onto the bed, his head down as though he were a whipped dog. He pushed aside the nightshirt that had become the uniform of imprisonment here, and lowered his head. 

"Look at me," Enjolras whispered. 

Dutifully, Grantaire raised his eyes.

Enjolras did not give him the satisfaction of groaning aloud as his mouth closed over his cock. He had been half-hard already at the argument, and pushed aside the thoughts that whispered that his arousal at Grantaire's tears and debasement was a betrayal of who he was. There was no one left to betray. 

He fisted his hand, the one he could move without much pain, in Grantaire's short hair. The other man didn't seem to mind, continued meeting his eyes as he had been commanded. Enjolras pushed his head down, anything to get him to flinch. 

He got his wish. 

"Do you still worship me?" he asked. "The man who lead his friends to their deaths, who survived beyond his lot in life. You do, don't you? It's pathetic. And you wonder why I could never love you. You disgrace the very streets you walk. You are nothing, Grantaire. It would have been better if you had never been born." 

Grantaire did not even attempt to reply. Enjolras shoved him down once more, and he choked a little, gasping for air. 

"You are nothing," Enjolras repeated. "Nothing." 

The word turned into a moan as he spoke, and he thrust up almost involuntarily as he came. When Enjolras released him, Grantaire sat up, coughing. He let some of the white liquid drip on the bedsheets, and wiped it away with an absent hand. 

"Was that sufficient?" he asked. 

Enjolras nodded. 

Grantaire slid off the bed without another word. He did not offer to help Enjolras rearrange himself under the sheets. But he did pause momentarily as he reached the door. Without turning around, he spoke softly. 

"You are wrong, you know."

"I am not wrong about you, Grantaire." He spoke with confidence and stared at the ceiling. 

Grantaire shook his head. "I do not speak of myself," he said. "But you are wrong about what you deserve. I did not save you for selfish reasons, and you were not meant to die on the barricade that night. You are destined for something far greater, my friend. The others followed you out of their own free will. They may have failed, but the next revolution will not. Not with Enjolras alive to lead it." 

Enjolras pressed his head back into the pillows and closed his eyes against the tears. He did not open them again until Grantaire was gone.

\------

The doctor and the mousy maid took care of him for the next few days. Enjolras did make it to the end of the hall and back, and soon after he made it to the door of the house. He would have gone further, if the doctor hadn't stopped him. 

"You're not ready to go out yet," he had said. 

Enjolras shook him off and walked back to his room. 

He stared at the ceiling and traced over its patterns in his mind, trying to see something other than gunfire and death and Grantaire's red lips stretched around his cock, slick with spit and tears. He was not successful. 

He didn't count the days that passed, but it was not long after he nearly made it out the door when Grantaire appeared again. He stood in the doorway silently, and waited for Enjolras to notice him. 

"Your parents know you're alive," he said. "Your mother has been searching the dead for you, at all the barricades, and when she didn't find you, she and your father convinced them that there was no chance you were involved in the revolution. You're going home." 

Enjolras turned his head away. "I don't want to go home," he said. "I want to die." 

"Well, fuck you," Grantaire snapped. "Because you don't always get what you want." He would have looked tired, if Enjolras had turned to face him, but his head stayed firmly facing the wall, so Grantaire simply passed a hand across his face and sighed. "Go home, Enjolras," he said softly. "There are still people who love you on this earth. Let them take care of you, for once." 

And with that, he was gone. 

At home the servants hurried around, not looking at him, going about their business without ever staying very long in the same room as he was. The expensive doctors his parents paid for tutted at the clumsy stitches just below his ribs, but they decided that he was too far progressed for them to pull them out and try again, even if it would scar less. 

"What fool could have done such a botched job?" wondered the elderly doctor whose name Enjolras had forgotten. "Was he drunk at the time?"

Enjolras heaved out a laugh that did not warm him in the slightest and said "Probably." 

For all the bustle of people around him, his parents were hardly seen. His mother pursed her lips until they were white, and spoke sharply to everyone. He did not see his father. 

Weeks passed. Enjolras made it out into the garden, out into the streets, although his parents never allowed him to go very far and never alone. He was dressed in his old clothes, greens and blues because he could not tolerate reds. Although he leaned more heavily on his cane than was fashionable, he was walking again. Soon, they said, he would be healthy.

After one of his shorter walks one afternoon, just to the end of the garden and back, he was resting in his bed when his mother walked in without so much as a knock. 

"I was speaking to your father," she said, and Enjolras marveled at how she said that, as if a conversation with the man she had married was so noteworthy. "We have received an invitation to the Pontmercy wedding at the end of the month. I believe you went to university with the boy, and we had some family connections. Will you be well enough to go?"

Enjolras raised his eyes to her. 

"Pontmercy?" he asked. "Marius?" 

"That is his name, yes. 

"Marius is alive?" 

She did not seem to know what to say to that. 

"I do not think I will be well enough," Enjolras said quietly. It was hardly an appropriate continuation to what he had just said, but the formal answer slipped out automatically, the tone of dismissal, as useful in high society as it had been leading a revolution, was enough to make her turn and go. 

Marius was alive. 

Grantaire hadn't spoken of him- but maybe Grantaire had not known. Enjolras was willing to give him that much credit, although it was wrenched out of him like blood and bullets. Where had Marius been? Enjolras remembered him from the first assault on the barricades, remembered him holding the powder keg under the nose of the National Guard. Marius, just brave enough to be insane, just insane enough to have survived. 

Enjolras did not remember him much after that. He had told the man to take some rest, but had not taken any himself. 

Marius had not been with them when they had tried to escape indoors. But few had been. Joly and Bossuet had fallen together before their retreat. Feuilly had made it across the threshold, but they had lost him barely inside. It hadn't mattered. It hadn't been safe for any of them.

But it had. Enjolras, Marius, and Grantaire. The three had survived, against their own wishes in Enjolras's case. 

And in Grantaire's. 

Enjolras stood slowly. He was tired from the walk through the garden, but he would not put this off any further than he had to. He had been confined to his rooms, either here or in the pit that Grantaire had found for him, since he had woken up. He owed his friends better. He should have been able to give his life for them, but that chance had been taken from him. In the absence of the death he deserved, he could at least pay them the respect they were owed. 

His mother was still in the hall when he came out, and she started when she saw him. 

"Where are you going?" she asked. 

"There is something I need to do," Enjolras said. He ducked out, even half-dressed as he was with his waistcoat lying on his bed and his cravat dangling around his neck like a noose tied too gently by a hangman drunk on duty. 

There was someone trying to follow him, but he eluded them, ducking through an alleyway and escaping through the crowd. 

They were buried together, for the most part, families either having forgotten them or left them unclaimed, too ashamed or afraid to claim the bodies from the revolution. It was hardly above a mass grave, and Enjolras was sure that the king would have preferred to have hung their bodies in the town square, an example for others, if it would not have been considered unseemly. 

There was more at the graveyard than Enjolras would have expected. The people were cowed out of helping, but a few must have come by to lay flowers on the graves, tie ribbons too loosely, sot hat they fell to the ground, littering the dirt with their dull colors. There were even a few tricolors, though Enjolras supposed that was more for the convenience of getting rid of what was no longer useful than anything else. 

The yard was empty except for a lone man who knelt in the dirt, his head bowed nearly to his knees. Enjolras did not have to come close to recognize him, but he did anyways. He was only a few steps away when he spoke Grantaire's name. 

Grantaire looked up, though his gaze was half-hearted at best. He didn't bother to pretend to be surprised by Enjolras's appearance, and his face was streaked with dust and tears. 

"You offered your condolences," Enjolras said. 

From the looks of it, Grantaire had been expecting harsh words, or a blow, but he blinked at the statement that was presented instead. There was no comprehension on his face. 

"For the barricade," Enjolras clarified. "When you told me of what had happened, that the barricades had fallen, you offered me your condolences. But when you told me of their deaths, you did not. why?" 

"They were my friends too," Grantaire said. His voice came out barely above a whisper. "The revolution was yours, yours and theirs, not mine. As you once said, I did not believe in it, nor in anything else. But just because I could not believe didn't mean I could not love. I loved our friends, Enjolras, each one of them. You do not offer condolences to one who shares your grief." 

He was looking at his hands again, and at the grave marker before him. 

"I have been cruel to you," Enjolras said.

Grantaire twisted his head in the way he used to when he laughed, self-deprecating and harsh, but there was no laughter now. "Yes." He did not deny it. 

"Forgive me," said Enjolras. 

"I don't know if I can." Grantaire looked surprised at his own words, but he still did not look up. "But even if I could, what purpose would it serve? You are alive for another revolution, for a second chance at what you were made for. I am alive by pure happenstance, and will likely continue the way I had been before. Do you think that my forgiveness will assuage your guilt? If so, consider yourself blameless. I was foolish, and your words towards me were harsh, but not untrue. But if you wish your next revolution to succeed, you may do well to rid yourself of some of the dead weight that dragged the last down. I won't trouble you." 

"I want you to," Enjolras said. "Trouble me, I mean. Because Grantaire- no, don't shrink away, look at me. Grantaire, you have were here for the worst of me these past few months, and before that, you never shied away from troubling me, and I learned from it, more than I had ever learned from classes or books. You made me understand the people I was fighting for. Then and now, I need you. Although," he looked away, "I can hardly expect you to forgive me, not with how I have treated you." 

Grantaire shook his head. "Perhaps I cannot forgive you, but I can forget, or at least put it out of my mind for the time being. You say that you need me? I can hardly expect you to understand the meaning of the world need. Me, on the other hand- no. You need a friendly face, a reminder of what you were fighting for, but I need you. And I will be there, until you send me away. I understand, you know, what you meant when you spoke of dying where you belonged. You belonged on the barricades, even if it wasn't your time to die there, and I belong by your side, and I expect I will die in my place, where I belong." 

"There are still people who love you on this earth, Grantaire." Enjolras echoed the other man's words from earlier. "And you will have your place, to stay as long as you need."


	2. Random Porny Epilogue (to cheer myself up after that really depressing prompt fill)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About a year later, give or take.

Enjolras was sitting at his desk, pretending that all the walking he had done that day hadn't put a strain on his weaker side, and trying to write out a pamphlet when Grantaire distracted him with a kiss to the throat. Enjolras twitched, as though he was going to brush him off, but he did not, and Grantaire persisted. 

"Come to bed," he muttered. "The revolution will still be here in the morning." 

"So you say," Enjolras replied. "But somehow, I can't quite bring myself to believe you." 

He turned anyway, meeting Grantaire's lips in his own, and feeling the other man smile against him. "Come to bed," he repeated. 

Enjolras stood with little reluctance. He allowed Grantaire to lead him, arms around his waist, still pressing kisses to his mouth and jaw, and he pushed him lightly, when they reached their bed. 

"Eager tonight," Grantaire teased. 

Enjolras shushed him, pulling off his own shirt and undoing the laces on Grantaire's trousers as he pulled them down. Grantaire reached for the oil by the bedside, but Enjolras stopped him. "Not tonight," he murmured. "Tonight I want to see you come apart." 

"You see that every night," said Grantaire, but he lay back and let Enjolras kneel on the bed before him. 

The blonde leaned down, pressing a kiss to the inside of Grantaire's thighs, smiling as the other man groaned. 

"I love you," he said quietly, almost too quiet to hear, but he knew that Grantaire was attuned to it. He did not hear those words often enough, and his ears would not risk missing them when they were spoken. 

He licked along the underside of Grantaire's cock, but replaced his tongue with his hands so he could talk. "I cannot imagine trying to survive without you, now or ever. I cannot imagine how any person gets through their days without knowing that you love them. I can hardly remember how I did so." 

The movements of his hands were not enough for now and he slid his lips over Grantaire's length. 

"Enjolras," moaned his lover. "Enjolras, fuck." 

Enjolras didn't come all the way off him this time, but he spoke with some difficulty, his breath ghosting over Grantaire's cock. 

"If I thought my place was to die for the revolution, I had never been between your legs like this. I belong here. There is nothing- no one- that I want more." 

He plunged his head down now, although he kept his eyes on Grantaire's face. Grantaire's hands fisted in his blond hair, but they didn't try to move him or hold him in place. His fingers tangled in the curls and then loosened, stroking them. 

Enjolras continued to speak, although he knew that Grantaire couldn't understand him at all, his mouth stretched as it was around his cock. "I love you," came out as a low hum, a buzz that set Grantaire groaning and gripping his curls tighter, a babble of adoration and profanity spilling from his lips. Enjolras traced the words along the underside of his cock with his tongue, and Grantaire whimpered and shouted as he came. 

Enjolras swallowed carefully before he crawled up against Grantaire, bringing the blankets with him to cover them. He stroked a hand through his lover's hair and smiled because he knew the awe in Grantaire's eyes was tempered with fondness, reflecting the look in his own. 

"You are the greatest man I have ever known," he said, "and I am lucky to have you by my side. I owe you my life, and not for what you did at the barricade, but for every day since." 

Grantaire pulled him close in a kiss. "I think," he whispered, his lips brushing Enjolras's skin as he spoke, "I might need you." 

"I need you too," Enjolras said, and Grantaire believed him.


End file.
